Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of Manhunt, thinks September 11th attacks were "defensible"

[afeelingunacted]

What the absolute fuck pic.twitter.com/ofyBwxxWBP
- Casey Stegman (querying) (@cstegman) November 16, 2023

• In a series of now deleted tweets the author condemned The Guardian taking down Bin Laden's Letter to America in which he reveals his reasoning behind the September 11th attacks
• Felker-Martin called destroying the twin towers "principled" and "

Comments

[solira21]

I don't appreciate the tone. I wasn't coming for you specifically in posting this-by "massive press attention," I don't mean LiveJournal posts; I mean things like Biden actually taking the time out of his day to talk about the Bin Laden TikTok trend, for example.

But if you want to play that game: Felker-Martin has always been sort of ridiculous and, like many other twitter personalities, I simply can't imagine a universe in which simply ignoring her, after a brief condemnation and a block, isn't more effective than trying to make it a story. Whether you're intending to do so or not, these outrage cycles are usually designed to paint the twitter main character of the day as symptomatic of issues throughout some vague concept called "internet leftism"-almost always a stand-in for a plurality of other things, most of which don't actually constitute a coherent political movement and are just whatever people happen to be annoyed about at the time.

The net effect of those outrage cycles is, quite frankly, a distraction. If people actually gave a shit about antisemitism, for example, they'd know full well that the way to avoid ridiculous people gaining traction in the spotlight is to not be baited into online news cycles that encourage narcissists to emerge, be struck down, and replaced by new narcissists, and for people in marginalized groups to be given a cult of personality one day and destroyed the next. (Felker-Martin certainly got a foothold because of her POV on trans issues). It's actually vitally important to keep a level head about how significant an impact these micro-celebrities should have on our outlook about the validity of a leftist movement.